Book review.

Reiner's Remembrances

Comic's `Novel' Would Be Better Without Pseudonyms

August 23, 1995|By Reviewed by A.M. Pyle, a writer and critic.

Continue Laughing

By Carl Reiner

Birch Lane, 257 pages, $19.95

`Continue Laughing" is Carl Reiner's semi-autobiographical continuation of the equally semi-autobiographical "Enter Laughing." Reiner picks up the story of future comic David Kokolovitz in 1942, when Kokolovitz is still in the Bronx and having a particularly satisfactory late adolescence enjoying the favors of Margie Skulnik.

A career break takes David out of the Bronx. Employed at a nearby machine shop since high school and feeding his theatrical cravings with a dollar-a-week acting job in "The Bishop Misbehaves" at the seedy Marlowe Theatre for the Performing Arts, David has gotten an offer to tour the South with a Shakespearean repertory company.

Prying himself loose from Margie, David boards the train and heads for his new life as Don Coleman, repertory actor. (Of course it sounds an awful lot like Ronald Coleman. That's the point.)

There's nothing left nowadays like The Avon Shakespearean Company, the wacky, soon-to-be-extinct group Reiner-as-Don Coleman lands with. The outfit is run by a couple of washed-up stars, the grind of one night stands in Dixie is exhausting, the actors are the crew, the buses are on their last legs and rehearsal time for the four plays is measured in hours rather than weeks.

But what fabulous training for an actor. Doing Shakespeare again and again and again. Method schmethod. You act. As a matter of fact, you act the way Elizabethan actors did, learning the roles from "sides"--that is, your own speeches and the four last words of the preceding speech.

Don Coleman is thrilled to be working at what he wants to do and, unknowingly, what he's going to do, which is comedy. He's not only meeting the kind of bizarre people who turn up handy in comic sketches, but he's also learning to do the best kind of double talk, filling in for those understandably forgotten speeches. He's thinking on his feet.

The girl in the troupe he falls hardest for, Mary Deare Prueitt, turns out not only to need his help getting out of an unwanted pregnancy but to be equally attracted to him. Their pairing survives wretched dollar-a-night hotel accommodations (the actors pay out of their miserable wages) and takes David into the most spectacular scene in the book, a meeting with Mary Deare's mother and stepfather, a fascist Southern senator Mrs. Prueitt married to cover up her own mistimed pregnancy.

Don politely takes insult after insult from the senator until four or five drinks of bourbon have the usual effect on a novice drinker. Right in the senator's face.

The tour ends with a letter from Uncle Sam, who needs David almost as much as the Avon Shakespeare Company. Don Coleman no longer, David ends up in the Army's signal corps and is ready to be shipped out to the war in the Pacific when he is saved by yet another fabulous opportunity. Not only does someone who sounds a whole lot like Moss Hart spot him as a comic comer, an actor who sounds a whole lot like Maurice Evans turns out to need someone funny and fast on his feet to emcee a touring variety show.

So David tours the South Pacific with a microphone instead of a rifle and gets even more valuable experience for someone who's going to enter the new age of television in a couple of years. There are hair-raising flights from just-won island to just-won island, but it beats a foxhole. And David has the good sense to know it. And to write home to Mary Deare proposing marriage. Does she accept? This is not a plot-driven book, so it is not giving away too much to say that Carl Reiner has been married to the same lady since--well, since the war. Good stuff happens sometimes. That's nice.

And this is a nice book. Well, Carl Reiner's a nice man--so nice that it seems rude (but justifiable) to wonder why we have to fool around with semi-autobiography. Nothing libelous is said here about anything or anybody. And it's pretty easy to guess who the famous people are. So why can't we have the real thing? With pictures of the family? That would be even nicer.